2.16.2013

El asno / José Antonio Ramos Sucre

The Ass

I could not suffer the gloomy house and I was walking through the meadows of the scholarly city.

I enjoyed the solitude riding on an ass and I stopped in the presence of a serene river. The birds were flying within reach of my hand and towards the love of a gust from the infinite. I was searching in the heart of the low clouds the origin of a music of lutes.

A holy king’s seneschal had separated me from soliciting health by means of letters and was inviting me to embrace the humility of incipient creatures. The seneschal’s behavior made me repose from the febrile meditation.

The holy king lived afflicted by the objections of a morbid consciousness and qualified himself as arrogant upon accepting from his brothers the ministry of servants for his table. The label was inspired by a passage from the Bible.

The holy king had directed me to think of the devil’s detours and assaults on the souls of the moribund. The modest trot of my mount was facilitating rapture and the loss of my faculties. The frugal and resigned ass, present at the ceremonies of the cult, was dividing the supreme affliction with me. He saved me in a sudden race upon discovering, in the tangle of some fluvial cattails and lentils, the ignoble obesity of a sphinx with oblique eyes.